Time Travelers Strictly Cash (5 page)

“It’s all right, John. Truly-I’m okay. I’m terribly disappointed, of course,, but when you look at it in perspective this is really just a minor setback.”

“No,” he said very quietly. “It isn’t.”

“Of course it is. Look, it’s perfectly obvious what’s happened. Some kind of cryonic traurea wiped his mind. All his memories are gone, he’ll have to start over again as an infant. But he’s got a mature brain, John. He’ll be an adult again in ten years, you wait and see if he isn’t. I know him. Oh, he’ll be different. He won’t be the man I l knew; he’ll have no memories In common with that man, and the new ‘upbringing’ is bound to alter his personality some. I’ll have to learn how to make him love me all over again. But I’ve got my Archer back!”

Dirnsdale was struck dumb-as much by admiration for her indomitable spirit as by reluctance to tell her that she was dead wrong. He wished there were some honorable way he could die himself.

“What’s ten years?” she chattered on, oblivious. “Hell, what’s twenty years? We’re both forty, now that I’ve caught up with him. With the medical we can afford, we’re both good for a century and a quarter. At least sixty more years we can have together, that’s four times as long as we’ve already had! I can be patient another decade or so for that.” She smiled, then made herself become businesslike. “I want you to start making arrangements for his care at once. I want him to have the best rehabilitation this planet can provide, the ideal childhood. I don’t know what kind of experts we have to hire, you’ll have to-“

“No!” he cried.

She started, and looked at him closely. “John, what in God’s name is wrong with-” She paled. “Oh my God, they lost him, didn’t they?”-

“No,” he managed to say. “No, Reb, they haven’t lost him. They never had him.”

“What the tuck are you talking about?” she blazed. “I heard him cry, saw him wave his arms and piss himself. He was alive.”

“He still is. Was when I came in here, probably still is. But he is not Archer Howell.”

“What are you saying?”

“Bharadwaj said a lot I didn’t understand. Something about brain waves, something about radically different indices on the something-or-other profile, something about different reflexes and different-he was close to babbling. Archer was born after the development of brain-scan, so they have tapes on him from infancy. Eight experts and two computers agreee: Archer Howell’s body is alive down the hall, but that’s not him in it. Not even the infant Archer. Someone completely different.” He shuddered. “A new person. A new, forty-year-old person.”

The doctor outside was on his toes, feeding tranquilizers and sedatives into her system in a frantic attempt to keep his telemetry readings within acceptable limits. But her will was a hot sun, burning the fog off her mind as fast as it formed. “Impossible,” she cried, and sprang from the bed before Dimsdale could react, ripping loose tubes and wires.

“You’re wrong, all of you. That’s my Archer!”

The doctor came in the door fast, trained and ready for anything, and she kicked him square in the stomach and leaped over him as he went down. She was out the door and into the hallway before Dimsdale could reach her.

When he reached the room assigned to Archer Howell, Dimsdale found her sitting beside the bed, crooning softly and rocking back and forth. An intern and a nurse were sprawled on the floor, the nurse bleeding slowly from the nose. Dimsdalc looked briefly at the diapáed man on the bed, and glanced away. He had once liked Archer Howell a great deal. “Reb-“

She glanced up and smiled. The smile sideswiped him.

“He knows me. I’m sure he does. He smiled at me.” As she spoke, a flailing hand caught one of hers, quite by accident. “See?” It clutched, babylike, but with adult strength; she winced, but kept the smile.

Dimsdale swallowed. “Reb, it’s not him. I swear it’s not. BharIdwaj and Nakamura are absolutely-“

The smile was gone now. “Go away, John. Go far away, and don’t ever come back. You’re fired.”

He opened his mouth, and then spun on his heel and left. A few steps down the hail he encountered Bharadwaj, alarmed and awesomely drunk. “She knows?”

“If you value your career, Doctor, leave her be. She knows-and she doesn’t believe it.”

Three years later she summoned him. Responding instantly cost him much, but he ignored it. He was at her Alaskan retreat within an hour of the summons, slowed only by her odd request that he come alone, in disguise, and without telling anyone. He was conveyed to her den, where he found her alone, seated at her desk. Insofar as it was possible for one of her wealth and power, she looked like hell.

“You’ve changed, Reb.”

“I’ve changed my mind.”

“That surpnses me more.”

“He’s the equivalent of a ten or twelve year old in a forty-three year old body. Even allowing for all that, he’s not Archer.”

“You believe in brain-scans now?”

“Not just them. I found people who knew him at that age. They helped me duplicate his upbringing as closely as possible.” Dimsdale could not guess how much that had cost, even in money. “They agree with the scans. It’s not Archer.”

He kept silent.

“How do you explain it, John?”

“I don’t.”

“What do you think of Bharadwaj’s idea?”

“Religious bullshit. Or is that redundant? Superstition.”

“When you have eliminated theimpossible…’ “she began to quote.

“-there’s nothing left,” he finished.

“If you cannot think of a way to prove or disprove a proposition, does that make it false?”

“Damn it, Reb! Do you mean to tell me you’re agreeing with that hysterical Hindu? Maybe he can’t help his heritage, but you?”

“Bharadwaj is right.”

“Jesus Christ, Rebecca,” he thundered, “is this what love can do to a fine mind?”

She overmatched his volume. ‘I’ll thank you to respect that mind.”

“Why should I?” he said bitterly.

“Because it’s done something no one ever did in all history. I said you cannot think of a way to prove or disprove Bharadwaj ‘s belief. No one ever has. “Her eyes flashed. “I can. I did.”

He gaped at her. Either she had completely lost her mind or she was telling the truth. They seemed equally impossible.

At last he made his choice. “How?”

“Right here at this desk. Its brain was more than adequate, once mine told it what to do. I’m astonished it never occurred to anyone before.”

“You proved the doctrine of reincarnation. With your desk.”

“With the computers it has access to. That’s right.”

He found a chair and sat down. Her hand moved; and the chair’s arm emitted a drink. He gulped it gratefully.

“It was so simple, John. I picked an aibitrary date twenty-five years ago, picked an aibitrary hour and minute. That’s as close as I could refine it death records are seldom kept to the second. But it was close enough. I got the desk to-“

“-collect all the people who died or were born at that minute,” he cried, slopping his drink. “Oh my God, of course!”

“I told you. Oh, there were holes all over. Not all deaths are recorded, not by a damn sight, and not all of the recorded ones are nailed dOwn to the minute, even today. The same with birth records, of course. And the worst of it was that picking a date that far back meant that a substantial number of the deaders were born before brain-scan, giving me incomplete data.”

“But you had to go that far back,” he said excitedly, “to get live ones with jelled personalities to compare.”

“Right,” she said, and smiled approvingly.

“But with all those holes in the data-“

“John, there are fifteen billion people in the solar system. That’s one hell of a statistical universe. The desk gave me a tentative answer. Yes. I ran it fifteen more times, for fifteen more dates. I picked one two years ago, trading off the relative ambiguity of immature brain-scans for more complete records. I got fifteen tentative yeses. Then I correlated ail fifteen and got a definite yes.”

“But-god damn it all to hell, Reb, the fucking birthrate has been rising since forever! Where the hell do the new ones come from?”

She frowned. “I’m not certain. But I note that the animal birthrate declines as the human increases.”

His mouth hung open.

“Do you see, John? You’re a religious fanatic too. The only-difference between you and Bharadwaj is, he’s right. Reincarnation exists.”

He finished his drink in a gulp, and milked the chair for more.

“When we froze Archer, he died. His soul went away. He was recycled. When we forced life back into his body, his soul was elsewhere engaged, We got pot luck.”

The whiskey was bitting him. “Any idea who?”

“I think so. Hard to be certain, of course, but I believe the, man we revived was a grade three mechanic named Big Leon. He was killed on Luna by a defective lock-seal, at the right instant.”

“Good Christ.” He got up and began pacing around the room. “Is that why there are so many freak accidents? Every

time you conceive a child you condemn some poor bastard? Of all the grotesque-” He stopped in his tracks, stood utterly motionless for a long moment, and whirled on her.

“Where is Archer now?”

Her face might have been sculpted in ice. “I’ve narrowed it down to three possibilities. I can’t pin it down any better than that. They’re all eleven years old, of course. All male, oddly enough. Apparently we don’t change sex often. Thank God.”

Dimsdale was breathing heavily. “Rebecca,” he began dangerously…

She looked him square in the eyes. “I’ve had a fully equipped cryotheater built into this house. His body’s already refrozen. There are five people in my employ who are competent to set this up so it cannot possibly be traced back to me. There is not one of them I can trust to have that much power over me. You are the only person living I trust that. much, John. And you are not in my employ, which is another plus.”

“God damn it-“

“This is the only room in the system that I am certain is not bugged, John. I want three perfectly timed, untraced murders.”

“But the bloody cryotechs are witnesses-“

“To what? We freeze and thaw hini again, hoping it will bring him out of it somehow. From the standpoint of conventional medicine it’s as good an idea as any. No one listened to Bharadwaj, there is no accepted explanation for Archer’s change. And no one but you and I know the real one for certain-evea the desk doesn’t remember.” She snorted. “Nine more attempted defrostings since Archer, none of ‘em worked, and still nobody’s guessed. There’s a moratorium on defrosting, but it’s unofficial. We can do it, John.” She stopped, and sat back in herchair, became totally expressionless. “If you’ll help me.”

He left the room, left the house, and kept going on foot. Four days later he re-emerged from the forest, bristling with beard, his cheeks gaunt, his clothes torn and filthy. Most of his original disguise was gone, but he was quite unrecognizable as John Dimsdale. The security people who had monitored him from a distance conveyed him to her, as they had been ordered~ and reluctantly left him alone with her.

“I’m your man,” he said as soon as they had gone. She winced, and was silent for a long time.

“You’ll have to kill Bharadwaj too,” she said at last.

“I know.”

Rebecca Howell gazed again at the defrosted thing that had once been Archer Howell but the torrent of emotions was tamed this time, held in rigid control. It may not work on this shot, she reminded herself. I’m only guessing that his soul will have an affinity for his old body. He may end up ma crib in Bombay this time. She smiled. But sooner or later I’ll get him.

“Seńora, It would be well to do it now.”

The smile vanished and she turned to the chief surgeon. “Doctor Ruiz-Sanchez, I said 1200 hours. To the second. You have made me repeat myself.”.

Her voice was quite gentle, and a normal man Would have gone very pale and shut up, but good doctors are not normal men. “Senora, the longer he is on machine life-support-“

“HUMOR ME!” she bellowed, nd he sprang back three steps and tripped over a power cable, landing heavily on his back. Technicians jumped, then went expressionless and looked away. Ruiz-Sanchez got slowly to his feet, flexing his fingers. He was trembling. “Si, seńora.”

She turned away from him at once, returned to contemplation of her beloved. There was dead silence in the cryotheater, save for the murmur and chuckle of life-support machinery and the thrum of powerful generators. Cryotechnology was astonishingly power-thirsty, she reflected. The “restart.. er” device alone drank more energy than hez4esk, though it delivered only a tiny fraction of that to the pineal gland. She disliked the noisy, smelly generators on principlel but a drain this large had to be unmetered. Especially if it had to be repeated several times. Mass murder is easy, she thought.

All you need is a good mind and unlimited resources. And one trusted friend.

She checked the wall-clock. It lacked-five minutes of noon. The tile floor felt pleasantly cool to her bare feet; the characteristic cryotheater smell was subliminally invigorating. “Maybe this time, love,” she murmured to the half-living body. “Maybe not. But soon.”

The door banged open and a guard hurled backward into the room, landing asprawl. Dimsdale stepped over him, breathing hard. He was wild-eyed and seemed drunk.

Only for the barest instant did shock paralyze her, and even for that instant only the tightening of the corners of her mouth betrayed her fury at his imprudence.

“Seńor,” Ruiz-Sanchez cried in horror, “you are not. sterile!”

“No, thank God,” Dimsdale said, looking only at her.

“What are you doing here, John?” she asked carefully.

“Don’t you see, Reb?” He gestured like a beggar seeking alms. “Don’t you see? It’s all got to mean something. If it is true, there’s got to be a point to it, some kind of purpose. Maybe we get just a hair smarter each time round the track. A bit more mature. Maybe we grow. Maybe what you’re trying to do is get him demoted. I’ve studied all three of them, and so help me God every one of them is making more of his childhood than Archer did. They may not grow up to be as successful as he was. But they’ll be happier.”